The Replacement

The rise of Roland Burris.

Roland Burris still occupies temporary office space in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in a suite far from the floor of the United States Senate, so when the buzzer signalling an imminent vote interrupted his lunch the other day, he put down his plastic soupspoon, left his sandwich untouched, and hustled out into the marble hallway. “I’m not missing any votes,” he said. “They’ll get on me for that, too.”

Burris, the junior senator from Illinois, is trim and fit for a man of seventy-one, with a full head of hair barely flecked with gray. He beckoned a young aide to keep up as he bounded toward an elevator reserved for senators. There, Burris was joined by two Democratic colleagues, first Maria Cantwell, of Washington state, then Blanche Lincoln, of Arkansas. Burris had been a senator for less than two months—he was appointed by Rod Blagojevich, then the governor of Illinois, on December 30th, to fill the unexpired term of Barack Obama—and he had yet to learn the names of all of his colleagues. “Hello, Senator!” Burris said cheerfully to each woman. They nodded, smiled back at him, and, looking slightly embarrassed, stared down at the floor.

In the basement of the building, Burris raced to catch the subway to the Capitol, and when he arrived he met Ron Wyden, of Oregon, and Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, who, having already voted, were heading in the opposite direction. “Senators!” Burris said, and the two men made the same gestures as the pair in the elevator had: a friendly nod followed by an averted gaze. Burris darted into one of the tiny elevators that take senators up to the Senate floor, and Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, wrapped an arm around his shoulder, squeezing so hard that the men’s heads were practically touching. “Hang in there, my buddy!” Coburn said.

Few senators in history have made a more ignominious national début than Roland Burris. Blagojevich appointed Burris, a former Illinois comptroller and attorney general, just three weeks after the Governor had been arrested and taken from his home in handcuffs. Blagojevich was charged with crimes relating to his alleged attempts to exploit his office for personal and political gain, including trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat. (Blagojevich maintains he did nothing wrong.) The entire Democratic caucus in the Senate, as well as the President-elect, asked Burris to refuse the appointment, and Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office a few days later. Burris ignored the entreaties, assumed the office, and plunged almost immediately into another scandal.

In a succession of raucous public appearances, Burris gave contradictory, perhaps even self-incriminating, explanations of the circumstances leading to his appointment. (He has both denied and admitted discussing the Senate seat with Blagojevich’s advisers in advance of his selection.) In short order, editorials in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times called for Burris’s resignation, a demand echoed by the new governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, and by Dick Durbin, the state’s senior senator. “As far as my colleagues here in the Senate, they are grasping as I am to try to get to the truth of this situation,” Durbin said after failing to persuade Burris to quit. “They are confused and concerned about the disclosures that have been made.” An Illinois prosecutor is investigating Burris for possible perjury and related crimes, and the matter is also before the Senate Ethics Committee.

During his long career in Illinois politics, Burris has encountered many of the state’s most influential figures, some of them principled risk-takers and some corrupt rogues. And it’s been clear that Burris belongs to neither category. He is a conventional politician, one guided far more by cautious self-interest than by ideological passion. His self-regard may be greater than that of some of his peers; he is especially known for the words of self-celebration carved into the wall of a mausoleum that is waiting for him in a Chicago cemetery. (The structure bears the inscription “Trail Blazer” and lists such accomplishments as being the first African-American undergraduate at Southern Illinois University to be an exchange student at the University of Hamburg, in Germany.) “He was a figure of fun, because he was highly egocentric,” Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman in Chicago, said of Burris’s years as a local politician. “When he was in office, he had two aides who went around with him, and they were generally referred to as the ‘Rolaids.’ ” According to the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, a longtime student of Chicago politics, Burris “was a soldier, part of the machine. He’s not a distinguished politician. He’s not a powerful political thinker.” Of course, this description hardly distinguishes Burris from many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. In his very ordinariness, Burris may represent a triumph of sorts for the civil-rights movement, which was, at least in part, a struggle for black people to be seen as just like everybody else.

Roland Burris’s paternal grandfather was born in Tennessee, but around the turn of the last century he moved to Centralia, a small city two hundred and seventy miles south of Chicago, in the heartland of Illinois. Even then, Chicago represented the center of African-American life in the state, but Centralia was a major outpost for the Illinois Central Railroad, which drew black migrants from the South. When Burris was born, in 1937, the city had about thirteen thousand people, including about two thousand blacks.

Centralia is roughly on the same latitude as Louisville, and, even after the Second World War, Southern ways prevailed. In 1951 and 1952, the local N.A.A.C.P. tried and failed to integrate the public swimming pool, and the following year the city’s African-Americans decided to try again. This time, Burris’s father, who worked for the Illinois Central and served as the vice-president of the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., travelled to East St. Louis to hire a lawyer to push the integration effort; the elder Burris laid out a hundred dollars as a retainer, a considerable sum at the time, given that he was making around forty cents an hour. Roland, who was fifteen, was chosen to test the ban with a group of his friends over Memorial Day weekend. “We headed out to the pool; we bought our ticket,” Burris told me, as we sat in his Senate office. “They sold us a ticket, because there was all this build-up before. They knew we were coming. You could see the whites lined up all outside, and here are these five little black kids with two chaperones. And they had to line up on the outside as well. And we went in; we showered; went out; swam in the pool. No incident. No issue.”

For the Burris family, though, the successful effort had an unhappy postscript. The lawyer, an African-American, never showed up in Centralia and disappeared with the retainer. “If we, as a race of people, are going to get anywhere in this society, we’ve got to have lawyers and elected officials who are responsible and responsive—that’s what my dad said, and it resonated with me,” Burris told me. “I was never in any serious trouble, but I’d beat up on people. I was a tough little kid. And I changed my whole attitude. Went back to high school my junior year. I took one of my brother’s suits that he had left home from college, got one of my dad’s white shirts, ’cause I didn’t have a tie, and I went to school my junior year dressed up. I made myself two goals. One, I want to be a lawyer. Number two, I want to be a statewide elected official of Illinois.”

Not everyone might have drawn these particular lessons from the events at the Centralia pool, but Burris has hewed with remarkable precision to his teen-age ambitions. He attended Southern Illinois University and, during his year in Hamburg, lived in a dormitory with students from thirty countries. “And, of course, I was elected president of the dormitory,” Burris told me. “After meeting all the other people, you recognize the leadership skills. That’s when I really knew.” He obtained a law degree from Howard University, in Washington, D.C., then moved to Chicago, where he worked as a bank examiner, travelling around the Midwest, evaluating the soundness of small financial institutions. Around this time, Burris married, and he and his wife, Berlean—now a retired university administrator—moved to Chatham, a middle-class black neighborhood on the South Side. With the first of his goals behind him, Burris set to work on the second: his political career.

Jesse Jackson, who is four years younger than Burris, also moved to Chicago in the early sixties. Jackson had recently graduated from North Carolina A. & T. State University, where, as a civil-rights activist leading lunch-counter sit-ins, he earned the attention of the state’s governor, Terry Sanford. Jackson planned to attend seminary in Chicago, but he also needed a job, so Sanford wrote a letter of introduction for him to the city’s mayor, Richard J. Daley. Daley offered Jackson a job as a toll collector (which Jackson declined), and invited him to join the Democratic organization on the South Side. “He sent me out to Fifth Ward, which is a ward that is heavily black,” Jackson told me recently. “The constituency there was blacks who worked for the organization.”

Daley was at the peak of his power as the boss of the city’s Democratic machine. The key to his control of Cook County was his ability to give or withhold jobs—from street-cleaner to member of Congress. Those who supported Daley’s Democratic organization with their votes and labor were rewarded; those who did not were punished. “There was so much fear,” Jackson told me, as we sat in the converted Chicago synagogue that has been his base of operations for forty years. “Every city official was in the machine. And so if you wanted to be a policeman or a fireman or a principal, you had to be blessed by the machine. If ministers challenged that machine in their pulpits on Sunday, you had building inspectors at the church on Monday, to check out the church—fire escapes, all that stuff.”

On the South Side, and in other neighborhoods with large African-American populations, Daley contracted much of his patronage operation to what was known as the “submachine,” a group of compliant black politicians, led by Congressman William Dawson. Even though Dawson made sure that blacks received a share of government jobs, Jackson and others in the nascent civil-rights movement noted that the submachine had no interest in challenging Daley on broader issues, like fair housing and school integration. When Jackson started attending Democratic Party meetings, he said, “I began to raise certain questions.”

So, in 1967, did a young Harvard Law School graduate and Korean War veteran named William Cousins, Jr. “I was an independent Democrat,” Cousins told me. “I was never affiliated with the regular Democratic organization, which we call the machine.” Even though Cousins’s neighborhood on the South Side was largely African-American, there were no blacks in positions of political leadership. Cousins decided to run for alderman—the Chicago term for a member of the City Council. “I asked Roland if he would serve as my campaign chairman, even though he had never before been actively involved in politics,” Cousins said. “But he had served on a neighborhood conservation committee, to see that repairs were being made on our infrastructure, and I was impressed with him.” At the time, the district included much of Chatham, the neighborhood where Burris still lives, in a home once owned by the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

In those days, Burris displayed the energy and enterprise that are indispensable for a political career. By 1967, the year Cousins ran for alderman, Burris had become the first black vice-president at Continental Illinois National Bank, in Chicago. “I was very active in all types of community groups,” he told me. “Like the Avalon Park Community Council. That’s where I met Bill Cousins. We were trying to fight City Hall about the broken curbs, the potholes, and the torn-up sidewalks. And so I did a report, about every pothole in that section, every broken curb in that section, all bad sidewalks.” City Hall responded. “Within six or seven months, they began to repair those broken streets and sidewalks and curbs,” Burris said. “And that kind of impressed Cousins.” With Burris’s help, Cousins won his race for alderman. (Cousins went on to become a widely admired Illinois judge.)

In 1968, emboldened by Cousins’s success, Burris decided to run for state representative, but lost to a machine-backed candidate. Four years later, an executive with Montgomery Ward named Dan Walker mounted an independent Democratic bid for governor of Illinois, and Burris signed on to help. Walker won a surprise victory, and Burris joined his staff as a director of Central Management Services, a major administrative job. When Walker ran for reëlection, in 1976, Burris decided to run for comptroller, a statewide post. But Mayor Daley, who despised Walker, put together a slate of candidates to run against the Governor and his team, and Walker and Burris were swamped in the 1976 primaries. (Walker later went to prison for his role in a savings-and-loan scam that took place after his term as governor.)

Jesse Jackson hired Burris as the executive director of his civil-rights organization, then known as Operation PUSH. “As this black thing kept growing, a guy like Burris ends up on the ticket as a civil but nonthreatening guy,” Jackson told me. “He was a black in Dan Walker’s cabinet. And when it was over, he didn’t have a job. Other campaign members had jobs and consultancies and this and that. And so our board hired Roland. One, because he was competent. Two, because, for our own movement credibility, to have a guy like Roland as the chief operating officer in some sense made it easier to get support.” Burris worked for Jackson for less than a year. “It didn’t last very long, because he moved on to his political work,” Jackson said. “He served us well, and it was a kind of mutually beneficial deal. There was nothing acrimonious about it. And Burris knows how to talk to white people and black people. He is not seen as a marcher, a protester, one who will scale walls.”

Because of a quirk in the law, the result of a change to the state constitution, the comptroller job became open again just two years later, in 1978, when the incumbent decided to run for a different post. This election was a turning point for Burris. He had given up banking for politics, yet he had never won a race. “I talk to my wife, and I say, ‘You know, honey, I want to try to go for comptroller,’ ” he recalled. “And she was saying, ‘No, you lost,’ and this other stuff. My wife looked at me one day and said, ‘I’ll tell you what. The only way that I can support you running for comptroller again is that you run with the Party’s endorsement.’ That threw down the gauntlet.” Burris met with Eugene Sawyer, a Daley stalwart and an African-American, who later served briefly as Chicago’s mayor.

“We’d see each other on occasion, and we’d chat, and Gene said, ‘You oughta think about joining us.’ And so I said, ‘No, I’m going to keep my independent stripe,’ ” Burris recalled. But after the conversation with his wife, Burris went to Sawyer with a different message. “I walked into Gene Sawyer’s office in July of 1977,” Burris said. “Made an appointment with him, walked in. ‘Yeah, Roland, what do you want?’ ‘Well, Alderman’—he was alderman then, Sixth Ward—‘I’d like to join your organization. What do you do?’ ‘You’re in!’ ‘What does it cost me?’ And he says nothing. And he looks at me and says, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘Well, I want to run for state comptroller.’ Gene Sawyer looked at me and said”—Burris rapped his knuckles on the table—“ ‘Fine! Let’s do it, Roland.’ Just like that! He says, ‘I’d always wanted you to come on around.’ ”

T he Daley machine chose its slate of candidates at meetings of the state central committee of the Democratic Party. Daley’s supporters dominated the proceedings, but now and then a few reformers also won election as committeemen and so were allowed to attend, if not influence, the slating meetings. Alan Dobry, who was a veteran of Chicago reform politics, attended the state committee meeting in 1977. “Roland was trying to get put up for Illinois comptroller,” Dobry recalled. “When he got up and spoke to the central committee, the first thing they said to him was ‘You started out as Bill Cousins’s campaign manager, what about that?’ But Roland assured everyone that he wasn’t an independent like Bill Cousins anymore, and was now a faithful member of the machine. Then they asked where does his committeeman stand on this? Gene Sawyer got up and said, ‘Roland is not an independent; he is a faithful member of the Sixth Ward Democratic Party organization.’ ” (One of the first people Burris hired to his staff as a U.S. senator was Sawyer’s nephew.)

And so, with the machine’s help, Burris realized the second of his career ambitions, by winning the statewide race for comptroller in 1978. The job has few major responsibilities, aside from auditing various branches of state government, and Burris began planning a run for higher office. He lost a Democratic primary for the Senate to Paul Simon in 1984 and served three terms as comptroller, until 1991. When the state’s attorney general ran for governor in 1990, Burris got the Democratic nomination for attorney general, again with machine support. He won the election, and critics saw his pact with the machine as a sign that he had put his ambition ahead of his values. “He would do what he was told, and stay out of trouble,” Dobry said. “Nobody took him seriously. Every time he got one of these state jobs, he took care of the machine in his patronage. The machine always liked having one of their own as attorney general.” According to Bernard Stone, a longtime Chicago alderman, Burris is “a very personable guy, and he never had the reputation of having his hand out. He was always a go-along guy. When he’s run with Party backing, he’s won; when he ran against the Party, he lost. It’s as simple as that.”

Burris did institute several reforms as attorney general. “He started a women’s-advocacy division, the first one in an attorney general’s office, using government resources to promote gender equality,” Diane Rosenfeld, who was a top aide to Burris at the time and now teaches at Harvard Law School, told me. “We focussed on violence against women, and trained state’s attorneys on prosecuting these cases.” Burris also made efforts to tighten environmental laws, though he was generally stymied by the Republican-dominated legislature in Springfield. Certainly the job allowed Burris to indulge his temperamental aversion to controversy, except on the one occasion when controversy found him.

On February 25, 1983, Jeanine Nicarico, a ten-year-old who lived with her family in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, stayed home from school because she was sick. When her older sisters came home that afternoon, Jeanine was gone. Two days later, after a widely publicized search, her body was found in a gully not far from her home. She had been raped and beaten to death. In 1985, after an investigation led by the DuPage County state’s attorney’s office, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, young men who lived in a neighboring town and had minor criminal records, were tried and convicted of Jeanine’s murder, and sentenced to be executed.

The attorney general of Illinois is required by law to represent the government in all appeals of death sentences. The Nicarico case already had a tangled legal history by the time Burris took it over. Despite great public pressure on authorities to solve the murder, there had been no arrests for more than a year. Eventually, though, Cruz and Hernandez were charged; the case against them was based largely on vague but incriminating statements made by Hernandez. In 1988, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed their convictions, on the ground that they should have been tried separately. Cruz was tried again in 1990 and again convicted and sentenced to death. The appeal reached Burris’s office in 1991. (A second trial of Hernandez ended in a hung jury; a third ended in a conviction and an eighty-year prison sentence.)

Burris had been on the job for less than a year, but it was an open secret that he planned soon to run for governor. Democrats, especially African-Americans, are often challenged to prove their tough-on-crime bona fides to voters, and the Cruz appeal offered Burris a chance to make his mark in a high-profile case.

The assignment to write the government’s brief went to a young prosecutor, Mary Brigid Kenney. “It was a famous case,” the lawyer, now Mary Brigid Hayes, told me. “I went through the record, taking everything in the defendant’s brief with a grain of salt, but I saw the trial was just replete with errors. I reached the conclusion that I could not in good conscience argue that any error was harmless and this man should be executed.” Two years after Jeanine Nicarico was murdered, a man named Brian Dugan had been arrested and had pleaded guilty to killing a child in a town near Naperville. In the course of negotiations to avoid the death penalty, Dugan confessed to other crimes, including Nicarico’s murder. During Cruz’s second trial, his lawyers had been allowed to mention Dugan’s confession to the jury, but the trial judge prohibited the defense from putting forward much other evidence that Dugan might be the actual killer. “Most of the evidence that corroborated Brian Dugan’s confession did not get to the jury,” Hayes said.

In a memorandum to Burris on February 14, 1992, Hayes wrote, “After thorough examination of the record, I have concluded that I cannot, in good conscience, ask the Illinois Supreme Court to affirm the conviction.” She was convinced that Dugan was the murderer and that Burris’s office should “confess error”—the legal term used by a prosecutor to acknowledge a miscarriage of justice. Hayes didn’t hear back from Burris, but she tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade his top aides of her position. Finally, on March 5, 1992, Hayes resigned. “My ethical responsibilities as an officer of the court compel me to take this action because I cannot sit idly as this Office continues to pursue the unjust prosecution and execution of Rolando Cruz,” she wrote to Burris, concluding, “I too, beg of you, General Burris, please begin mitigating the damages of this ugly prosecution. Do not help execute an innocent man.”

Hayes’s letter was leaked to the media, and Burris called a press conference to respond to her charges. “A jury has found this individual guilty and given him the death penalty,” Burris said at the time. “It is my role to see that it is upheld. That’s my job.” Burris’s subordinates continued to press for Cruz’s execution. As Thomas Frisbie and Randy Garrett recount in “Victims of Justice Revisited,” their 2005 book about the murder, the new prosecutor assigned by Burris to the case concluded his oral argument to the Illinois Supreme Court with the words, “Set a date certain for the execution of Rolando Cruz.” The court voted four to three to affirm the conviction and the death sentence.

Cruz’s lawyers, led by Lawrence Marshall, then a law professor at Northwestern University, continued to fight the execution. In 1995, DNA tests excluded Cruz as a source of semen found on Nicarico’s body and implicated Dugan. After a third trial and eleven years in prison, most of them on death row, Cruz was released, as was Hernandez. (Later this year, Dugan will stand trial for Nicarico’s murder.) In 2000, Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in Illinois, and three years later, just before leaving office, he commuted the sentences of all inmates on death row to life in prison or less, and pardoned Cruz. Ryan has cited the Cruz case as a major factor in changing his thinking about the death penalty. (Ryan is now in federal prison, after being convicted of crimes that took place when he was Illinois’s secretary of state, before his term as governor.)

Burris offered no apology for seeking to execute an innocent man, but faulted Mary Brigid Hayes for her behavior. “She was given the authority by the appellate officer to work up the brief for appeal to uphold the jury conviction,” Burris told me. “And then she reads this brief, evidently, and says this person is innocent. Well, that’s not for a lawyer to decide.” He went on, “She was overridden by my staff people, because I wasn’t even in this. And they filed the brief, and she got upset and said that she couldn’t talk to me and resigned. So that’s the gist of the story. That’s it.”

In 1994, Burris began his run for governor as the favorite for the Democratic nomination. Burris and Richard Phelan, one of the two other candidates, both laid claim to support from the Chicago machine, but by this time its power was much reduced, especially in statewide races. The third contender, Dawn Clark Netsch, came from behind to win, but she, in turn, was routed in the general election against the Republican incumbent, Jim Edgar.

Within months of losing the primary, Burris, determined to return to office, began running for mayor of Chicago as an Independent. The incumbent, Richard M. Daley, defeated him, sixty per cent to thirty-six per cent. Burris opened a law and lobbying practice, working with his son, Roland, Jr.—he also has a daughter, Rolanda, a university administrator—but he continued to pursue elected office. In 1998, he ran for governor again and received thirty per cent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Four years later, Burris ran for governor a third time, finishing third in the primary, behind the eventual winner of the general election, Rod Blagojevich.

There were no hard feelings between the two men. “Roland was the attorney general when I was a brand-new state legislator,” Blagojevich told me when he visited New York recently. “I sat on the Judiciary Committee in the House, and he testified in front of us a few times. He seemed like a very nice man, honorable guy. He spoke German. That impressed me.” To anyone who had followed Burris’s career, it was not surprising that once Obama appeared likely to win the 2008 Presidential race, Burris would declare his interest in filling out Obama’s Senate term.

At the heart of the current controversy around Burris is what he did to persuade Blagojevich to appoint him to Obama’s seat. (Burris declined to discuss this subject.) Blagojevich told me that he thought of the selection process as having occurred in two phases—before and after his arrest, on December 9, 2008. “He was not in the first tier of options that I was considering in Round One,” Blagojevich said. Based on the information in the federal complaint against the Governor, it seems that the likely leading candidates in Round One included Jesse Jackson, Jr., the Illinois congressman; and Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser to Obama. But Blagojevich’s arrest radically altered the political calculus surrounding the appointment.

At a press conference on December 9th, Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney who brought the case against Blagojevich, implied that he arrested the Governor to stop him from appointing someone to the Senate seat. “Governor Blagojevich has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political-corruption crime spree,” Fitzgerald said. “We acted to stop that crime spree.” In a remark captured by a government bug, Blagojevich had said to an adviser, of Obama’s seat, “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing.”

After Blagojevich’s arrest, it was widely assumed that even though he was still governor, he would not have the nerve to make an appointment to the Senate, and, in any event, such thinking went, no one would accept the job from such a tarnished figure. Perhaps Blagojevich wanted to mock the political establishment, or hoped to ingratiate himself with a diverse jury pool. He has said that he made the appointment simply to insure that Illinois was represented by two senators, and he told me, “There was a preference for an African-American for this seat.” Clearly, the universe of possible candidates shrank dramatically after December 9th. But Blagojevich’s arrest proved to be Burris’s big chance. The Governor sent one of his criminal-defense attorneys—an unusual emissary—to ask Burris, who had not figured prominently in his earlier considerations, whether he was interested.

The conversation occurred on Sunday, December 28, 2008. “The lawyer told me that Roland had asked that I call him directly and make the offer,” Blagojevich told me. “I was watching the Cowboys and Eagles fighting for the last playoff spot. I called him at four o’clock to offer the seat.” Burris accepted. Every Democrat in the Senate signed a letter asking Burris to refuse the appointment.

Blagojevich introduced Burris as the new senator at a news conference on December 30th. The main drama of that occasion was supplied by Bobby Rush, a veteran Illinois congressman and former Black Panther, who stepped to the podium to support Burris. Rush asked the reporters not to “hang or lynch” the man who would now be the only African-American in the Senate. Rush’s invocation of race stilled the ardor of Senate Democrats hoping to fight Burris’s appointment. “My colleague from Illinois, Congressman Bobby Rush, made strong statements along those lines,” Senator Dick Durbin said. “They were painful and hurtful, and it became part of this calculation.”

Illinois legislators still wanted to question Burris about his appointment, and he was called to Springfield to provide sworn testimony on January 8th. The main issue in the hearing was whether Burris had made a deal with Blagojevich to win the appointment. In the key exchange of the day, State Representative Jim Durkin asked Burris, “Did you speak to anybody who was on the Governor’s staff prior to the Governor’s arrest, or anybody—any of those individuals or anybody who is closely related to the Governor?” Burris answered, “I recall having a meeting with Lon Monk about my partner and I trying to get continued business, and I did bring it up—it must have been in September or maybe it was in July of ’08—that, you know, you’re close to the Governor, let him know that I am certainly interested in the seat.” (Monk is a former chief of staff to Blagojevich.)

Soon it emerged that Burris had submitted an affidavit to the legislature stating that “there was not any contact between myself or any of my representatives with Governor Blagojevich or any of his representatives regarding my appointment to the United States Senate.” This appeared to contradict his acknowledgment of contact with Monk, and at a press conference in mid-February Burris revealed that he had filed another affidavit stating that in October he had been asked by Rob Blagojevich, the Governor’s brother, to help raise money for the Governor. During that conversation, Burris stated, he had inquired about the possible selection of a successor to Obama. (He explained that he had filed the affidavit voluntarily, after realizing that his testimony was incomplete.) Worst of all, Burris subsequently admitted that he had tried, unsuccessfully, to help raise funds for the Governor while he was seeking the appointment. (His second affidavit notes a later conversation with Rob Blagojevich in which Burris said that he could not raise money for the Governor, because it could be seen as an attempt to influence the selection.) During his appearance at Chicago’s City Club, on February 18th, one questioner asked Burris, “Was it wrong of you to solicit funds for Rod Blagojevich at the same time he was considering you for the Senate?” Burris answered, “I was never considered for the Senate,” an assertion that was met with murmurs of incredulity.

Throughout February, ongoing revelations of apparent contradictions in Burris’s story prompted calls for him to resign. Burris responded with typical displays of his stolid good nature. “I’m from Centralia, you all know me, O.K.?” he said at the City Club. “You all know Roland Burris. But I have a history with you, a record that I have built over a lifetime. Thirty years in public life and never a hint of scandal.” Burris does not appear to be in great jeopardy of criminal prosecution. His answers may have been misleading, but not clearly false. (For example, he implied but did not state under oath that Lon Monk was the only person closely related to the Governor with whom he talked about the Senate appointment.) In any event, given the current economic environment, the Senate has more pressing matters to address than Burris’s fate. In recent weeks, a consensus seems to be forming that Burris will serve out Obama’s term, but will not run for another in 2010. Burris probably couldn’t win anyway, and he has now attained the goal that appears to mean most to him—adding United States senator to his list of achievements.

One of the responsibilities of the Illinois state comptroller is to regulate cemeteries. During Burris’s tenure in the job, he helped pass a law regarding so-called “pre-need,” a practice that allows advance purchasers of burial plots to pay for their final resting places in multiple installments. At his law practice, Burris helped clients prepare wills and plan for burials. “I’m an estate planner,” he told me. “So I’m up here telling people you should do pre-need, right? Well, how could I tell you to take care of your estate and I don’t have mine together? So, we then start shopping, the wife and I, for how we’re going to do this. And we came across Oak Woods Cemetery”—one of Chicago’s oldest burial grounds, located on the South Side.

Burris chose a design that is unlike any of the other hundred or so mausoleums on Oak Woods’s hundred and eighty-three acres. The structure is built of Barre granite, includes two columns and three tablets, and towers over the modest marker on the grave of Jesse Owens, which is a few steps away, next to the Lake of Memories. One hundred and fourteen words are carved into the stone, listing Burris’s accomplishments, several of them obscure. It notes that he was the first nonaccountant to serve on the board of directors of the Illinois C.P.A. Society, and that he was the first African-American on the board of trustees of the Financial Accounting Foundation. There is room to add his service in the Senate.

Burris told me that it was the cemetery’s managers who persuaded him to build the mausoleum. “It was their insistence,” he said. “ ‘Because this is not so much for you, Roland.’ And I didn’t even think about people thinking about my ego. This is for young people who can see a person who had accomplishments.” ♦

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